How to set realistic goals with your social media strategy

Do you really understand and know what you want to achieve with your social media marketing campaign? Do you know what social media can do your business? Have you included your social media strategy into your overall marketing mix?

With any digital marketing campaign, you need to be certain of your goals and objectives before you start, otherwise you can waste a lot of effort and time on something that is not producing targeted results.

If you have done your research and decided that you want to create a social media campaign, the next step in the process is convincing your boss or marketing department that the budget and time invested in social media will achieve the results that you want.

There are still people that believe that social media is irrelevant to their business and that it is only for the youth, but even if this was true, today’s youth are tomorrow’s CEOs.

Social media can make a huge difference in your overall marketing tactics and there are many articles online explaining how to work out the ROI (Return on Investment) with social media (Measuring the ROI of your social media campaign). Before you can start working out the ROI of your social media efforts, you need to know what you want to achieve with your campaign. It’s also vital to understand that social media is not a one time event. It is a long-term commitment to get the best results and to truly add value to your brand.

Identifying your social media goals

The first step is to identify your social media goals. If there’s no specific reason to use social media for your business, you will spend a lot of time and effort enjoying online conversations, but it will not produce positive results. You will not have anything good to show how this medium is working for you and no justification for the budget and time spent on it.

What overall business goals do you want to achieve with social media? Break these down and research whether this medium will help you meet your goals. Identify and be realistic on the goals you want to achieve. Use your marketing strategy and look at the goals of your current campaign. Can social media help you achieve those goals? Align your business and marketing goals with social media to see how it can support each other.

Social media marketing goals

There are many social media goals. Have a look below on a few that I have included that you can use in your plan. This list can give you a very good idea of what you can achieve with a proper campaign that is focused on getting results.

• Generating leads
• Increased sales
• Establishing though leadership
• Building awareness
• Increased reach
• Launch new services or products
• Research
• Insight
• Improved SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings
• Providing customer support
• Competitive analysis
• Improved client relations
• Support your current marketing tactics.

Always apply realistic time frames to all of your social media goals and identify the metrics you are going to use to measure your success. Set a timeframe and some objectives on how you are going to measure the results with your campaign. Your campaign should always be realistic and have a specific timeframe.